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Comment by sentenza | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it makes sense for equation-heavy fields. The biophysics stuff I did during my Phd, however, worked very well with Powerpoint. I'd always have the images-and-diagrams-only presentation without text as my goal, which I usualy managed to almost-achieve.

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In my view, nothing is more debilitating than trying to use PowerPoint for equations. I end up with severe eyestrain headaches and neck fatigue after an hour or so. For this reason I've given up on typeset equation altogether.

I attend occasional academic talks at the nearby university, and am seeing a growing trend towards simply pasting equations into PowerPoint in whatever their original format, such as MatLab or some programming language.

But I work in a business setting right now, and I've learned that equations in a presentation are taboo. A lot of non technical people assume if they see an equation, that the work is incomplete, otherwise you'd give an answer instead of an equation.

> A lot of non technical people assume if they see an equation, that the work is incomplete, otherwise you'd give an answer instead of an equation.

Jeez. I mean, I agree that it's poor form to stuff a presentation full of equations, but what a dumb reason that is... :(

Right, if the presenter has to spend forever scribbling on the whiteboard, that kind of kills the talk. Also, if you cannot read what they have written.

If you train yourself to become a decent draftsman, you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once. Sometimes there is no substitute for a photographic image though. Animations can also be amazingly useful.

> you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once.

I find LaTeX and TikZ perfect for that. If you're comfortable with programmatic markup, it's easy to produce detailed incremental diagrams with minimal effort, without the usual Powerpoint approach of "copy, paste, edit second copy, repeat, hope you never need to systematically change the base diagram".

The problem with equation-heavy fields is that slides don't allow for many equations on a single slide. This is a problem for derivations when you need to refer back to something.

Agreed.

My preferred style was to iteratively build equations over a few slides, explaining the pieces as I went, and having a legend for coefficients/terms.

I like handouts for the diagrams

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